Poemunity — your poem community

In the bath I look up and see the brown moth pressed like a pair of unpredictable lips against the white wall. I heat up the water, running as much hot in as I can stand. These handfuls over my shoulder—how once he pulled my head against his thigh and dipped a rivulet down my neck of coldest water from the spring we were drinking from. Beautiful mischief that stills a moment so I can never look back. Only now, brightest now, and the water never hot enough to drive that shiver out. But I remember solitude—no other presence and each thing what it was. Not this raw fluttering I make of you as you have made of me your watch-fire, your killing light.

Slow the voice goes slower. Slow the slow rain down. Slow the narrow fellow in the grass stiffens. Now the slow blood stirs. Slow the voice goes slower: Soft lead, soft enough to eat. We dine on soft lead with lampreys. Slow the voice goes down to harden. Slow the silt reaches the bottom, And Davy Jones eats His slow meal of rubber and clay. Slow the slow rain down can rain. Slow the dead is dead. Slow the light, light. Slow the spirit is a bone, Toy from a child’s coffin.

(for the ghost of Johann Sebastian Bach) He was born to wonder about numbers. He balanced fives against tens and made them sleep together and love each other. He took sixes and sevens and set them wrangling and fighting over raw bones. He woke up twos and fours out of baby sleep and touched them back to sleep. He managed eights and nines, gave them prophet beards, marched them into mists and mountains. He added all the numbers he knew, multiplied them by new-found numbers and called it a prayer of Numbers. For each of a million cipher silences he dug up a mate number for a candle light in the dark. He knew love numbers, luck numbers, how the sea and the stars are made and held by numbers. He died from the wonder of numbering. He said good-by as if good-by is a number.

From a documentary on marsupials I learn that a pillowcase makes a fine substitute pouch for an orphaned kangaroo. I am drawn to such dramas of animal rescue. They are warm in the throat. I suffer, the critic proclaims, from an overabundance of maternal genes. Bring me your fallen fledgling, your bummer lamb, lead the abused, the starvelings, into my barn. Advise the hunted deer to leap into my corn. And had there been a wild child— filthy and fierce as a ferret, he is called in one nineteenth-century account— a wild child to love, it is safe to assume, given my fireside inked with paw prints, there would have been room. Think of the language we two, same and not-same, might have constructed from sign, scratch, grimace, grunt, vowel: Laughter our first noun, and our long verb, howl.

Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop. They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs and wives. We thought they didn't read our stuff, whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never, or those that end, and he was silent as a carp, or those with middles which, if you think of the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch of beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights in the woods, they've read every word and noticed that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs is the revenge school of poetry, with titles like "My Yellow Sheet Lad" and "Given Your Mother's Taste for Vodka, I'm Pretty Sure You're Not Mine." They're not trying to make the poems better so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook or electrocution, as a group they overcome their individual senilities, their complete distaste for language, how cloying it is, how like tears it can be, and remember every mention of their long hours at the office or how tired they were when they came home, when they were dragged through the door by their shadows. I don't know why it's so hard to write a simple and kind poem to my father, who worked, not like a dog, dogs sleep most of the day in a ball of wanting to chase something, but like a man, a man with seven kids and a house to feed, whose absence was his presence, his present, the Cheerios, the PF Flyers, who taught me things about trees, that they're the most intricate version of standing up, who built a grandfather clock with me so I would know that time is a constructed thing, a passing, ticking fancy. A bomb. A bomb that'll go off soon for him, for me, and I notice in our fathers' poems a reciprocal dwelling on absence, that they wonder why we disappeared as soon as we got our licenses, why we wanted the rocket cars, as if running away from them to kiss girls who looked like mirrors of our mothers wasn't fast enough, and it turns out they did start to say something, to form the words hey or stay, but we'd turned into a door full of sun, into the burning leave, and were gone before it came to them that it was all right to shout, that they should have knocked us down with a hand on our shoulders, that they too are mystified by the distance men need in their love.

Late August was a pressure drop, rain, a sob in the body, a handful of air with a dream in it, summer was desperate to paradise itself with blackberry drupelets and swarms, everything polychromed, glazed, sprinkler caps gushing, the stars like sweat on a boxer's skin. A voice from the day says Tax cuts for the rich or scratch what itches or it's a sax from Bitches Brew, and I'm a fool for these horns and hues, this maudlin light. It's a currency of feeling in unremembered March. There's a war on and snow in the city where we've made our desire stop and start. In the dying school of Bruce I'm the student who still believes in the bad taste of the beautiful and the sadness of songs made in the ratio of bruise for bruise.

It is more onerous than the rites of beauty or housework, harder than love. But you expect it of me casually, the way you expect the sun to come up, not in spite of rain or clouds but because of them. And so I smile, as if my own fidelity to sadness were a hidden vice— that downward tug on my mouth, my old suspicion that health and love are brief irrelevancies, no more than laughter in the warm dark strangled at dawn. Happiness. I try to hoist it on my narrow shoulders again— a knapsack heavy with gold coins. I stumble around the house, bump into things. Only Midas himself would understand.

It could be a clip, it could be a comb; it could be your mother, coming home. It could be a rooster; perhaps it’s a comb; it could be your father, coming home. It could be a paper; it could be a pin. It could be your childhood, sinking in. The toys give off the nervousness of age. It’s useless pretending they aren’t finished: faces faded, unable to stand, buttons lost down the drain during baths. Those were the days we loved down there, the soap disappearing as the water spoke, saying, it could be a wheel, maybe a pipe; it could be your father, taking his nap. Legs propped straight, the head tilted back; the end was near when he could keep track. It could be the first one; it could be the second; the father of a friend just sickened and sickened.

the blood-smear across the knuckles: painless, inexplicable. once you discover it pain will begin, in miniature. never will you learn what caused it. you forget it. the telephone answered on the twelfth ring: silence without breath, cunning, stark. and then he hangs up. and you stand there, alone. then you forget. and your father's inexplicable visit: two days' notice, a ten-hour reckless drive. rains, 80 mph winds, bad luck all the way, traffic backed up, a broken windshield wiper, and no stopping him. clumsy handshakes. How are—? You seem—! How good to —! How long will—? he must leave in the morning, must get back. a gas station two blocks away repairs the wiper. did he sense death, and so he raced to us? did he already guess at his death behind those nervous fond smiles, the tumult of memories he had to bear? nothing we know can explain his visit, or the new, strange way he moved among us— touching us, squeezing our arms, smiling. the visit was an excuse. the words that surrounded our touching were an excuse. inexplicable, that the language we invent may be a means to get us closer, to allow us to touch one another, and then to back away.

What slender youth, bedew’d with liquid odors, Courts thee on roses in some pleasant cave, Pyrrha? For whom bind’st thou In wreaths thy golden hair, Plain in thy neatness? O how oft shall he Of faith and changed gods complain, and seas Rough with black winds, and storms Unwonted shall admire! Who now enjoys thee credulous, all gold, Who, always vacant, always amiable Hopes thee, of flattering gales Unmindful. Hapless they To whom thou untried seem’st fair. Me, in my vow’d Picture, the sacred wall declares to have hung My dank and dropping weeds To the stern god of sea.